There are times when supporting science-based health policy and opposing health policies that sound compassionate but are not are easily portrayed as though I’m opposing mom, apple pie, and the American flag. One such type of misguided policy that I’ve opposed is a category of bills that have been finding their way into state legislatures lately known as “right to try” bills. Jann Bellamy and I have both written about them before, and with the passage of the first such bill into law in Colorado in May, I had been meaning to revisit the topic. Although “right-to-try” laws are a bad policy idea that’s not new, versions of such bills having been championed by, for example, the Abigail Alliance for at least a decade, the recent popularity of the movie Dallas Buyers Club appears to have given them a new boost, such that Colorado state Senator Irene Aguilar even frequently referred to her state’s right-to-try bill as the “Dallas Buyers Club” bill. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to revisit since the news out of Colorado, but apparently I needed a nudge, given that it’s two months later now.

Not too long ago, I expressed alarm at a series of bills that were popping up like so much kudzu in various state legislatures, namely “right to try” bills. Both Jann Bellamy and I warned that these bills gave a false illusion of hope to patients with terminal illnesses. Basically, these laws claim to grant the “right” of patients with terminal illnesses to access promising experimental medicines that have not yet been approved by the FDA. Indeed, these investigational drugs need merely to have passed phase I trials, and these “right to try” laws would allow them to be used in pretty much any human with a terminal illness who can persuade a pharmaceutical company to let them have such drugs. Of course, as I pointed out, such laws are based on a false premise, namely that there are lots of promising drugs out there that could save lots of lives of terminally ill patients, if only the hidebound FDA would get out of the way and let the people try them. The problem (besides the false assumption behind such laws) is that they are all state laws, and the FDA and federal law still trump state laws with respect to drug approval.

Apparently, advocates of “right to try” laws have gotten around to trying to take care of that little obstacle, too. I’m referring to a federal law under consideration in the House of Representatives and championed by the usual suspects, including the Alliance for Natural Health USA, a “health freedom” group that has yet to see a pro-quackery bill it doesn’t like.

In any case, at the time I originally learned about this bill, HR 4475, which was introduced by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) and entitled “The Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act of 2014,” its text hadn’t yet been published to the Congressional website. I did learn that the bill has been floating around for a while in various forms (for instance, former Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) apparently introduced it.) Now its text has been published, as Guy Chapman has noted. He calls it a “quack’s charter,” and he’s only off by a bit. The bill doesn’t go quite as far as he believes, but the bill is still plenty bad, man. If enacted, HR 4475 would amend the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by inserting after section 561 (21 U.S.C. 360bbb) the text of HR 4475. This section of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is entitled “Expanded Access to Unapproved Therapies and Diagnostics,” and it’s the section of the act that regulates exactly that. The interesting thing is that this particular section of existing law is the framework under which the whole system of single patient INDs (also known as “compassionate use exemptions”) is already based. As I’ve described before, single patients can receive promising unapproved drugs under what’s known as a single patient IND, which has to be approved by the Institutional Review Board and the FDA and allows single patients to receive unapproved drugs. You can (and many have) argued that the single patient IND process is too cumbersome and restrictive, but HR 4475 seeks to (mostly) nuke this requirement. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.(more…)

Mark Crislip, founder of the Society for Science-Based Medicine, whose board of directors I’m proud to be serving on, an organization that you should join if you haven’t already, sometimes jokes that our logo should be an image of Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra whom Zeus punished by compelling him to roll an immense boulder up a hill. However, the boulder was enchanted and, as soon as Sisyphus reached the top, it would roll back down the hill. Sisyphus was thus forced to repeat this action throughout all eternity. The metaphor is obvious. Those of us who try to combat quackery and the infiltration of pseudoscience in medicine often feel a lot like Sisyphus. I always used to argue that, as amusing as it might be to have such a logo as an “in” joke, it’s far too much of a downer to inspire what SSBM wants to inspire: Action in the form of volunteers taking on projects, such as converting Quackwatch into a wiki and then continuously updating and adding to that wiki indefinitely. We have to believe that there is hope of someday succeeding. “Let’s push that boulder up a hill one more time!” does not exactly constitute an inspiring rally cry, although I can definitely understand the feeling at times the older I get and the longer I’ve been doing this. We can all appreciate gallows humor at times, and, besides, I’m not that pessimistic. I can’t afford to be.

Even so, I can understand the Sisyphus analogy right now with respect to an unfortunately frequent subject of this blog, the doctor in Houston who proclaims himself a cancer doctor, even though he has no formal training in medical oncology, isn’t even board-certified in internal medicine, the prerequisite for undertaking advanced training in medical oncology, and has no discernable training in clinical trials management. I’m referring, of course, to Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, the Polish doctor who since 1977 has been treating patients with substances that he has dubbed “antineoplastons” (ANPs). What are ANPs? Burzynski claimed to have discovered ANPs during his time at Baylor and described them as endogenous cancer-fighting chemicals in human blood and urine. Unfortunately, he soon became convinced that only he could develop them into an effective chemotherapy drug and left Baylor to administer ANPs to his own cancer patients. Patients flocked to him because he claimed to be able to cure cancers that conventional medicine can’t cure.

This led to a series of battles between Burzynski and various authorities, including the Texas Medical Board, the FDA, and various attorneys general, because of his use of ANPs, which are not and never have been FDA approved, as well as for various—shall we say?—issues with insurance companies. Ultimately, in the 1990s Burzynski beat the rap and effectively neutered the FDA’s case against him by submitting dozens of clinical trials to the FDA for approval, which, given how much pressure the FDA was under from Burzynski’s friends in high places (like Texas Representative Joe Barton), the FDA ended up approving. However, as Burzynski’s lawyer himself bragged, these clinical trials were shams designed to allow Burzynski to keep treating cancer patients, not clinical trials designed to produce any real evidence of efficacy. Not surprisingly, although Burzynski has published the odd case report or tiny case series, he has not yet published the full results of even a single one of his many phase II trials. There is, quite simply, no convincing evidence that ANPs have significant antitumor activity in vivo in humans, even after 37 years. Meanwhile, the FDA has found numerous examples of Burzynski’s abuse of clinical trials, failure to keep necessary data, and failure to protect human subjects, while exposés by BBC Panorama and Liz Szabo at USA TODAY have been most unflattering, revealing at least one dead child as a result of the toxicity of Burzynski’s drug and a pattern of minimizing and hiding reports of adverse reactions.(more…)